12-Year-Old Boy From Texas Has Donated 10,000 Smoke Detectors to Area Families

Like a lot of his peers, in 2014 nine-year-old Hector Montoya from Grand Prairie, Texas, was saving up for a PlayStation 4. But after two of his neighbors—a mother and daughter—were killed in a deadly house fire, he decided to spend his money on something more important. Instead of the game console he so desperately wanted, Montoya used it to buy smoke detectors for the houses in his community.

"I asked my grandma why that family didn't have smoke detectors. She told me, 'Some people do and some people don't,'" he said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News last year.

With the money he saved, Montoya was able to buy 100 smoke detectors, that he distributed among the families in his community. “Saving a life is more important,” he told NBCDFW at the time.

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Three years later, Montoya, now 12, just donated his 10,000th smoke detector to residents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who previously didn’t have one. The city of Grand Prairie recently honored him for his efforts in a ceremony, and presented him with a $1,000 check.

"One life lost is one life too many," Montoya, who is working on a book about fire safety, told a television crew.